How long do I have to file after a crash?
Most states give two years from the date of the injury, and a wrongful death claim usually runs from the date of death rather than the crash. A claim against a government body can be far shorter. The deadline below is computed from the statute this site has sourced for that state.
How this works, and where the numbers come from
Every deadline on this page comes from that state's own fact file, which records the value, the statute it came from and the date somebody checked it against that statute. Nothing is inferred from a neighboring state and nothing carries a default. A state that has not been researched is absent rather than assumed.
The arithmetic is the obvious kind: a two-year deadline from 14 March 2026 is 14 March 2028. What it cannot do is apply the rules that move a deadline, and there are several that commonly do. A claim against a city, a county or the state usually carries a notice deadline measured in months. A claimant who was a minor, a defendant who left the state, and an injury nobody could reasonably have discovered at the time can each change the date.
Treat the result as the outside edge of the ordinary case and nothing more. The only safe version of this answer comes from an attorney licensed where the crash happened, looking at the facts.
The other lookups, and the cases they belong to
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